I also find it strange that one of the bitcoin developers announced selling a huge stash of their bitcoins over this whole 51% fear. I can understand why one would do that, but why announce it? Sounds like a joined effort to spread FUD..
He said he consulted a lawyer and was advised to announce it to prevent any possible liabilities. I'm buying that, it sounds reasonable to me. Heh, I could see a lawyer saying something like that. But in reality there's no way you could be held liable for something like that. It's like being required to say I'm going to be selling half my gold because I work at a goldsmith's shop. |
|
|
|
There are three features that are extremely important.
1. Fast
2. Cheap to use
3. Very easy to use
These are the core. If a coin is missing one of these three, it sucks.
Most coins suck.
I'm curious, do you have any exemple of a coin that is expensive to use or hard to use? Bitcoin is expensive and slow. Easy to use for the most part. But could be a lot better for the average person. |
|
|
|
|
People keep saying 'supernode' as if it's an actual technical designation in bitcoin. It's not.
It's a social construct created on these forums about 2 years ago.
A person could become a supernode by controlling a large amount of bitcoin as the main designation, and secondarily transacting as a trade conduit.
|
|
|
|
Bitcoin is decentralized because there is no central authority that controlls/says who owns how many coins.
Absent a 51% attack bitcoin would not be considered a centralized payment method in any way. Even if one pool operator controlled 60% of the hashrate the other 40% of the miners would still control 40% of the blocks and would enforce the rules of the Bitcoin protocall.
Even in a 51% attack the attacker could not create bitcoin out of thin air, nor could they process a TX that the "owner" of the sending address did not sign/agree to. They would only be able to reverse a TX
Actually, I beleive a miner with >50% is much more serious than you have written there: >=50%- Loss of decentralized trust narrative, inability to differentiate Bitcoin from competing technologies.
- Double-spends against 6-confirmed transactions are certain to succeed.
- Selected miner targeting: Pool can reject any selected block found by any competing miner.
- Selected transaction targeting: Pool can reject any selected transaction and keep it out of the blockchain.
- Selected address blocking: Pool can block Bitcoin flows in or out of selected addresses.
- Transaction Differentiation: Pool can deprioritize certain transactions and rely on other miners to mine them unless a (hefty) fee is attached.
- Fee Extortion: Pool can deny transactions from a particular address unless a (hefty) fee is attached to those transactions.
- Complete denial of service: Pool can ignore and orphan every single block found by competitors, thus stop all Bitcoin transactions.
Source: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-monopoly-can-attack-bitcoin/ |
|
|
|
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. It is at the "human-levels" where you are seeing the march toward centralization.
Sure, the human levels of things like the political situation with the dev team and the Bitcoin Foundation are somewhat a march towards centralisation. But that's not the same as being technically centralised like I outlined in my last post. Where the network itself relies on the trust of a single actor. But I do agree with you that over all the bitcoin community and the bitcoin business establishment is slowly consolidating. That might not necessarily be the worst thing for the currency in terms of widespread adoption. But we'll have to wait it out and see how well these organizations and companies can perform. Gox at one point was another human level centralisation of Bitcoin, and look how that turned out. |
|
|
|
a super node is simple a known static IP people can add so that they always have a main connection to th network to relay tx's.
now thats cleared up. all i have to say is
1. Banks are contracted to handle FIAT, being a node is meaning less to them. get over it, you wont see banks handing out bitcoins themselves.
2. people can choose which supernodes they connect to. so the end result of any fantasy Apocalypse scenario some tin foil hatter is about to dream up... wont happen as people will just ignore such nodes
Isn't that just a full node? I thought there was no actual 'supernode' designation for nodes running on the bitcoin network. Supernode was rpietila's concept that he brought to this forum. He ran his 'bitcoin supernode' text on his account for a long time. |
|
|
|
Personally I'd go with no. Maybe I'll throw on a bitcent or something. A year is not a very long time. I would think since the euros did it first they'll wait it out to see some results over there first. |
|
|
|
How big is this bowl game relative to other college bowl games?
I don't know too much about college football. But I know the bigger bowl games like the BCS Championship, Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Orange Bowl ect...
Its not one of the "bigger games" that is played on New Years Day or afterwards, which are typically meant for the better teams/bigger markets/better ratings. This bowl game is typically played by either a couple Conference USA teams or one C-USA teams & a MAC team. Both smaller conferences in relation to like the SEC or BIG10. However its the only game being played that day, December 26, so it'll still draw a crowd & viewers. BitPay is going to call it Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. Originally it was just the St. Petersburg Bowl, then Beef O Brady's bought the naming rights and named it the Beef O' Brady's Bowl, and now its the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. Pretty sure they have a 4 year agreement too, so it'll be around for a handful of years! Thanks for the answer. That is actually pretty good having it all alone on Boxing Day. They could have just gone all the way and called it the Bitcoin Bowl. That rolls off the tongue nicely. But I respect the fact that they wanted to give the bowl back it's real name as well. |
|
|
|
Litecoin  Good luck. But if more people think like you.... Don´t forget to sell than  Litecoin is far better than 99.9% of the shitcoins presented here in that forum ~CfA~ What does likecoin have? 1. ASIC resistant (not any more) 2. 2.5 min block (faster confirmations = greater risk in 51% scenario) Otherwise LTC is basically a copy/paste of BTC.. What's so good about that? The only good thing about LTC in my mind is basically the fact that it was second-to-market and has a substantial lingering community. Litecoin wasn't quite second to market if I remember correctly. But it was one of the first non scam coins. Solidcoin and other RealSolid coins were pretty bad. |
|
|
|
Even gold with its huge market cap is still relatively volatile. Bitcoin will always be relatively volatile as long as it isn't used as a widespread unit of account.
If it gets widespread enough, it will replace fiat which will make it basicly 100% stable. Noone will ever ask: "how much dollars or euro is 1 btc worh"? Answer would be: "What is dollar or euro?" Hehe. Pretty optimistic post . I dont think we will get there anytime soon . Maybe in like 50 years or so  Well of course. IT can burn right now down to 0 because of some unknown bug, or it can liv eon and take over fiat. It's just one of possibilities. What is for sure is that higher it goes, more stable it will get. Higher market cap doesn't mean stability. As pointed out by various posters, gold has trillion dollar market cap and it is no where near stable. No, but there is a correlation of stability with market cap. As it takes more money to move the market the higher you go. |
|
|
|
No question that Litecoin has a solid market cap but selling bitcoin out of fear of 51% and then buying Litecoin is like jumping from the pan into the fire. Litecoin can be attacked far more easily than Bitcoin. There was a pool with 51% on Litecoin just a couple of weeks ago! Add the fact that there are tons of promising new innovative technologies coming out in the altcoin world and I can't possibly see how Litecoin can look like a good investment. That is unless the Litecoin dev team is in the process of upgrading the protocol to get it up to 2014 standards. In which case I'm all for Litecoin and I'd be all over it. Is Litecoin being upgraded? |
|
|
|
One thing that I don't understand is how people buying Cex.io shares effects Ghash's total hashing power.
The way I'm thinking of it is that this is hashing power that's already 'working' as it were and people are just buying the rights to mining that's already being done anyway. Is this not correct?
I guess when they get more revenue, they buy more hardware. Yeah, that's a good point. By buying shares on Cex.io you're indirectly contributing to their hashrate in a delayed fashion. |
|
|
|
Even gold with its huge market cap is still relatively volatile. Bitcoin will always be relatively volatile as long as it isn't used as a widespread unit of account.
If it gets widespread enough, it will replace fiat which will make it basicly 100% stable. Noone will ever ask: "how much dollars or euro is 1 btc worh"? Answer would be: "What is dollar or euro?" Even if it does replace the dollar or euro it will still be compared to other things like gold, oil, other cryptocurrencies. Maybe someone will make a stable crypto backed by gold or something like that if bitcoin is too volatile. |
|
|
|
Just my luck that I literally just cashed out almost all of my hot btc to fiat just a few hours ago. I'll get some btc back in my hot wallet very soon. I don't want to miss this sale. I can't even log in to steam right now  Their servers must be overrun. |
|
|
|
Even gold with its huge market cap is still relatively volatile. Bitcoin will always be relatively volatile as long as it isn't used as a widespread unit of account.
That's what worries me too. Specifically the fact that gold, despite it's 'large' market cap is still unacceptably volatile to used as a currency. What is interesting though is that gold was much less volatile when US dollars were backed by gold. |
|
|
|
He was aware of the concept of pools, and he was aware of the possibility of someone gaining more than 50% of the hashing power: The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
I suspect that the concept of a pool acquiring more than 50% of the hashing power didn't go over his head. It's clear that he expected the financial incentives to protect the network regardless. At least with a pool, the people leasing their hash power to the pool can choose to leave. That makes a pool with more than 50% far more secure than Satoshi assumed a lone individual with more than 50% would be. He wasn't aware of pools when he designed bitcoin and laid the foundations of the protocol. It wasn't till much later when bitcoin was already well established that pools went from theory to reality. Pools were invented to solve the problem of variance in mining as I'm sure you're aware. But variance was never a major issue in 2009 and thus there was no problem to be solved. The problem of centralisation and trust has existed for a long time now. I specifically remember the community having the same outrage over Deepbit having almost half the hashing power on the network despite Deepbit having fees of 10%. Ever since the original Deepbit debacle bitcoin has relied on trust being placed in mining pools that hold significant hashing power. How can bitcoin be described as trustless and decentralised if we rely on a centralised power not to attack the system? I understand that it's not likely that a mining pool will attempt such an attack, and that it's almost never in their economic interest. However that doesn't negate the fact that the system still trusts that single actor to act rationally. Given the the fact that the value of bitcoin still thrives it would seem that the market has decided that this is an acceptable level of trust and centralisation. But the market accepting a certain level of risk does not change the fact that the risk itself is the risk of trusting a centralised actor. Thus Bitcoin is not a trustless decentralised currency but a pseudo-decentralised one. |
|
|
|
I've read a fair amount of Satoshi's posts and I remember that he didn't envision mining pools.
ribuck's description is spot on.
Pool operators can modify their getwork to take one additional parameter, the address to send your share to.
The easy way for the pool operator would be to wait until the next block is found and divy it up proportionally as:
user's near-hits/total near-hits from everyone
That would be easier and safer to start up. It also has the advantage that multiple hits from the same user can be combined into one transaction. A lot of your hits will usually be from the same people.
The instant gratification way would be to pay a fixed amount for each near-hit immediately, and the operator takes the risk from randomness of having more or less near-hits before a block is found.
Either way, the user who submits the hit that solves the block should get an extra amount off the top, like 10 BTC.
New users wouldn't really even need the Bitcoin software. They could download a miner, create an account on mtgox or mybitcoin, enter their deposit address into the miner and point it at anyone's pool server. When the miner says it found something, a while later a few coins show up in their account.
Miner writers better make sure they never false-positive near-hits. Users will depend on that to check if the pool operator is cheating them. If the miner wrongly says it found something, users will look in their account, not find anything, and get mad at the pool operator.
Right, that was just weeks before he disappeared. Prior to that mining pools were not something that was on his radar. He clearly didn't take into account the dangers of mining pools controlling large percentages of the network. At that point mining pools were a novel addition to bitcoin and the full impact of their existence obviously wasn't considered. |
|
|
|
if your going to use the word, spell it first
pseudo-decentralised
That was just a typo in the title. You can see that I spelled pseudonymous and centralised correctly in the post. I was worried about running out of characters in the title. I'm not sure exactly how many the forum allows. Although if a hyphen is appropriate I'll note that for future reference. |
|
|
|
There's checkpoint consensus, but then consensus allows for islands to form.
A simple technical (rather than social) solution to the 51% problem must exist, for PoW.
What do you guys think about this? Not a simple solution, but it's a big question to begin with .. Oh, I didn't see your link before I posted my post above. Just started reading it now, is it related in anyway to what I said above, or is this something solved by computers? |
|
|
|
The fixed hash rate idea is really interesting and it sounds good except for the fact that a botnet would easily take over the network. Often the only thing that limits botnets is the fact that most of the computers in the botnet are not very powerful. But in this case it wouldn't matter at all and sheer numbers would be the only thing that mattered. So in order for this to work the coin would absolutely have to have full protection against a >50% attack. Interestly enough a white paper was proposed today with a solution: http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdfI was wondering when someone would mention PoA. I don’t see this being implemented into Bitcoin, so there is a chance for another established alt to take it up. [Frankly, I wouldn’t trust another lame “clonecoin” with this implementation, even if it did it well. It’d essentially be another piece of crapshoot hype.] Anyhow, with the capped hash proposal, you’ve hit it on the head. A proposal like this falls prey to the PoW uniqueness problem. The “instamining” would just shift from those with power-heavy farms to those with clouds with multiple distinguishable connections (i.e. botnets). I don't know how viable it is in reality but the only thing I can think of to guard against this problem is a a coin that integrates human intelligence tasks in order to mine. Something like a capcha but possibly stronger than that. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
